“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognise inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.” ― Heidi Priebe

I’ve been thinking about relationships lately. I’m in a 30-year relationship myself, which is a jumble of highs and lows and left turns made right, but generally going about as good as one could hope for when we envision a lifetime coexisting with any one person. The part they don’t tell you is that it isn’t one person at all, but a person who is changing all the time, just as we are. The trick to a long term relationship is waiting out the parts of each other that aren’t delighting us in anticipation of the person we see them becoming. Hopefully they’re doing that with us.

The thing is, that couple who were so enthralled with each other once upon a time is still around, just weighed down by all the things that life throws at us along the way. We like to think that we’ll always be at the same place in life, but we learn quickly that each of us goes at our own pace. Sometimes we’re ahead, sometimes behind, but always committed for the long haul. Perhaps our wedding song showed us the way, all those years ago:

Now everyone dreams of a love lasting and true
But you and I know what this world can do
So let’s make our steps clear that the other may see
And I’ll wait for you
If I should fall behind
Wait for me
— Bruce Springsteen, If I Should Fall Behind

We all need to live a little before we’re really prepared for something as impactful as finding our partner for life, because life will surely wash over both people over and over again. We meet a few people along the way who may feel like the right one, only to develop into absolutely not the right one. I find myself grateful for having gotten it right, when we see so many that go wrong. What emerges from a rich life is the perspective to see that life partners are human, with all the complexity that comes with it. To find the right one, and then to grow together is to live a profoundly more meaningful life.